Re: Funny that

Re: Funny that

It was also a Sprint exclusive, a company that has perhaps the absolute worst customer service and has a horrible network. My dad had Sprint. He called customer service to ask for a copy of his bill. The correct response to such a question would be "Sure. Could you confirm that your address is ..." The response he got was "Why?" Needless to say, he wasn't a customer for long after that.

Re: root

And, for a lot of phones, pretty easy.

My previous phone was a grey-market Samsung device I bought from some Amazon Marketplace vendor. Came unlocked and rooted. Can't get much easier than that, and while it was a generation or two old, it was perfectly suited to my purposes and very cheap.

Screen died after a couple of years, but you take that chance with any device.

Re: Never even heard of it

Where is The Demographic Or Unsatisfied Demand?

A phone that fills a non-existent gap in a pretty saturated market offering the promise of 'home automation' that the very few early adopters have probably already bought anyway, what is to like? The rest of us have our homes already automated enough. All done with devices do not need to be fondled, loved, constantly recharged or for that matter that do not rely on some distant 'service' that goes to pot whenever the weather changes or the roads get dug up.

Not surprised. No real USP and they made the crucial mistake of omitting a headphone jack too. If you're going to try to appeal to Android geeks then you need to provide at least basic geeky functions.

Even Google's struggling with the Pixel 2 range for the same reason. And that's flippin' Google.

The omitted a headphone jack (like Google and Apple), as that is what the market said it wanted. Everyone jumped up and down and clapped their hands at the thought of a modular, upgradeable handset, and that's what you have, no fixed onboard DAC, but one that lives inside the headphone lead and is upgradeable.

I have a Pixel2, and like the fact I am not tied to whatever cheap and cheerful DAC is fitted in the phone, I bought a couple HTC £9 in line DAC, once for each set of headphones and just leave them attached, essentially turning my headphones into superior sounding USB-C headphones that can have the adapter removed and make them work with old legacy kit...

I've got RSS feeds for over a dozen tech sites in my browser toolbar, so if something is "much hyped", I would have expected to have at least been vaguely aware of it before articles about the poor sales figures start coming out.

Too many compromises

It's pretty, and it supposedly is near-stock Android for quick updates, and has the only good impl of hardware add-ons I've seen. It was my top pick, until it was released, and then:

no headphone jack, camera was awful at launch (supposedly getting better, but still nowhere near feature parity with flagships), and as pretty as it is, it needs a case, because while the exterior is rugged, the innards aren't. Also, I have Sprint and love it, but I can't imagine people hopping networks for this thing.